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Animal Farm: A Communist Manifesto
George Orwell's novel Animal Farm is subtitled "a Fairy Story", a label that may make the book seem innocent and appropriate for children and classroom settings. However, the title is misleading. Animal Farm is a work of Communist propaganda. It outlines and even encourages the overthrow of the government, and explains how to set up and maintain a communist state. It portrays government as corrupt and the public as stupid and easily manipulated. Orwell himself wavered between being a socialist and an anarchist.
Considering communist China's recent increased aggression, and deteriorating relations between them and the United States, the dangers of this novel must be weighed carefully. It is often taught in schools, despite the fact that it promotes un-American and anti-capitalist views. With today's political tension, do we really want our youth exposed to literature that encourages them to mistrust the government and supports a communist revolution?
Animal Farm is indeed communist propaganda. It describes how the animals overthrow the farmer and drive all humans from the farm. The animals create a set of laws, designed to eradicate all hints of humanity; humanity, of course, represents the capitalist government. The animals call each other "comrade", a clear reference to communism, and after the revolution the animals are described as being "happy as they had never conceived it possible to be" (Orwell 46).
The novel describes much of the procedure of running a communist state. It includes the organization of committees, and the indoctrination of the public in the form of the sheep. Snowball, one of the two pigs who leads the animals after the revolution, teaches the sheep to repeat the maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad," which, he feels, sums up the laws of their new system - completely against humans. Methods of propaganda are also explored. Carrier pigeons are sent to neighboring farms to deliver heroic tales of the revolution and convert other farms to 'Animalism' - the domino effect in action. Internal propaganda is the responsibility of a pig named Squealer, whose primary function is to convince the animals that the actions taken by the pigs are for their own good. This is a clear description of how to keep a communist regime in power: as long as the pubic is convinced that all actions are for their own good, they will go along with anything.
George Orwell's goal in writing the novel Animal Farm was to portray the events surrounding the Russian revolution that took place in 1917. Orwell's tale of Animal Farm is seemingly a story of how a group of farmyard animals plot to overthrow their owner and seize control of the land. The novel seems to be a simple story, however Orwell wrote this book as an allegory, a story that has a clear secondary meaning beneath is literal sense. Everything in Animal Farm is used to represent people and events that took place during the Russian revolution from 1917-1939. Orwell chose to represent Russia's three famous leaders during this time with three pigs. Each three are drastically different and have dissimilar beliefs. Snowball representing Leon Trotsky, Napoleon by Josef Stalin and Old Major by Karl Marx. Orwell wrote this and many other books as warnings. The warning is that people must change their ways, or we are most surely doomed.
Animal Farm by George Orwell is a novel based on the lives of a society of animals living on the Manor Farm. Although the title of the book suggests the book is merely about animals, the story is a much more in depth analysis of the workings of society in Communist Russia. The animals are used as puppets to illustrate how the communist class system operated and how Russian citizens responded to this. And also how propaganda was used by early Russian leaders such as Stalin, and the effort this type of leadership had on the behavior of the people of Russia.
One of Orwell's main reasons for writing Animal Farm was to show how the Russian (or Bolshevik Revolutionaries) Revolution of 1917 had resulted in turning a benevolent ideal of equality into a government of an even more oppressive, totalitarian, and dominating to the people, than the aristocratic one it had recently ousted. Many of the main characters (animals) and synapses of Orwell's parody, run parallel to the event of the Bolshevik Revolution: In Orwell’s novel, The Farm is a representation of Russia and its people, and the most important characters such as Old Major, Snowball, and Napoleon parody the central figures that shaped it into the nation it came to be.
One of the main characters of Animal Farm is the heartless and merciless leader Napoleon. Napoleon is a leader that prefers to have things his way and not cooperate with others, in other words really obnoxious. For example “He declared himself against the windmill from the start. One day, however, he arrived unexpectedly to examine the plan. He walked heavily round the sled, looked closely at every detail of the plans and snuffed at them once or twice, then stood for a little while contemplating them out of the corner of his eye; then suddenly lifted his leg, urinated over the plans and walked out without uttering a word.”(Page 33, chapter5) Thus, this proves that Napoleon is an obnoxious pig because just because he was against Snowball’s windmill idea he urinated all over his work so he could get his way.
The saying “history repeats itself” is used quite often, but how many times have you actually seen it happen? The book Animal Farm portrays the idea of history repeating itself. The character Benjamin and the pigs in the story show history repeating itself throughout the book. In addition to these characters within the book, North Korea displays history's repetition outside the book.
...sense? My next biggest thing would be the knowledge of what is wrong but giving into the flesh. I guess that would be what the people standing around the cross were doing.
To conclude my argument, I disagree with Reverend Hale. I belief it is better to die for your beliefs and principles than to give a false confession and sit in silence. It has been shown throughout history with many historic figures such as: Martin Luther king Jr and Rosa Parks starting the movement for equal rights, the men and woman in uniform protecting our country day in and day out, and our Founding Fathers, without them there would be no America to live
George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm is a great example of allegory and political satire. The novel was written to criticize totalitarian regimes and particularly Stalin's corrupt rule in Russia. In the first chapter, Orwell gives his reasons for writing the story and what he hopes it will accomplish. It also gives reference to the farm and how it relates to the conflicts of the Russian revolution. The characters, settings, and the plot were written to describe the social upheaval during that period of time and also to prove that the good nature of true communism can be turned into something atrocious by an idea as simple as greed.
As soon as Old Major had died Napoleon took his place as the leader of
Animal Farm is an allegory of the period in Russian history between 1917 and 1944. It is a satirical story written in the form of an animal fable. In writing Animal Farm as a fable, George Orwell is able to present his subject in simple symbolic terms by treating the development of communism as a story that is taking place on a single farm with talking animals. The characters of Animal Farm represent figures in Russian history during the Russian Revolution. Places, objects, and events of the Russian Revolution are also symbolized in Animal Farm.
Orwell’s Animal Farm closely follows the people and events of the Russian Revolution. In fact, Orwell wrote Animal Farm to convey the evil correlation between revolutions and tyrannies, and to point out the fault in revolutions (“Animal Farm” Literature). The Russian Revolution came about when the Bolsheviks took power after overthrowing Czar Nicholas II and Romanov rule, around the 1920s (Smele). This revolution was the real life version of the Rebellion on Animal Farm, an event in which the animals overthrew the evil humans who owned the farm. Two of the most well-known figures of this time include Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, who both used and accentuated propaganda. In the novella, Napoleon the pig represents Stalin. Both Napoleon and Stalin became a dictator and stopped any resistance to their power through the use of propaganda (Stults). Old Major, a respec...
Using threats and harsh punishments, he becomes a dictator, just like Stalin. In the novel Animal Farm, George Orwell uses political satires that correlate with the ruling of Stalin in Russia and his inhumane ways of controlling the country. Animal Farm was a metaphor for the Russian Revolution. The animals on the farm overthrew the farmer who treated them unfairly, and they began their own government. As time went on the pigs made themselves rulers, the main pig in charge being Napoleon.
Pigs walking on two feet, horses and sheep talking. This is how George Orwell satirizes human nature in his classic novel Animal Farm. Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The title of the book is also the setting for the action in the novel. The animals in the story decide to have a revolution and take control of the farm from the humans. Soon the story shows us how certain groups move from the original ideals of the revolution to a situation where there is domination by one group and submission by all the others. The major idea in this story is the political corruption of what was once a pure political ideal. Orwell uses satire to ridicule human traits in his characters such as Napoleon and Squealer. There are several different characters in the novel utilizing animals as symbols of people in real life during the Russian Revolution. Napoleon is the leader of the pigs that ultimately come to dominate the farm. The characteristics that we associate with pigs , lazy, greedy, and pushy are meant to symbolize the characteristics that the leaders of the Russian Revolution exhibited. Napoleon is admired by all of the animals because he is their leader. All of the animals believe that their leader wants to fulfill all of their needs. They also are convinced that Napoleon’s decisions are made the best interest of the animals. Napoleon’s piglike qualities are shown throughout the story. He exhibited greediness when he sold the dying horse, Boxer to a slaughterhouse for money so that he and the other pigs could purchase whiskey. Orwell ridicules human nature through Napoleon in the sense that he is trying to show how the greedy and power hungry eventually end in corruption.
In 1945 George Orwell published his allegorical novel, Animal Farm. Although this satire primarily addressed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Orwell’s larger critique was at the root of totalitarianism. Through the destruction of the Soviet myth, Orwell hoped to revive socialist movements and expose the dangers of propaganda in a enlighten society. Many present ideas are expressed about culture and place that depict the time period of the represented in Animal Farm. Cultural ideas such as tyranny replacing tyranny, totalitarianism, class warfare and language as power are portrayed throughout the novel. George Orwell’s Animal Farm endorses ideas held by society about the Russian Revolution. He wrote this novella to bout against the idea of totalitarianism or total government control of the low, working classes that were controlled in the Russian Revolution.
Writers often use social criticism in their books to show corruptness or weak points of a group in society. One way of doing this is allegory which is a story in which figures and actions are symbols of general truths. George Orwell is an example of an author who uses allegory to show a social criticism effectively. As in his novel Animal Farm, Orwell makes a parody of Soviet Communism as demonstrated by Animal Farm's brutal totalitarian rule, manipulated and exploited working class, and the pigs' evolution into the capitalists they initially opposed.